Police Reform in Turkey

Human Security, Gender and State Violence Under Erdogan

Funda Hulagu

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781838604141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How has the supposedly liberalizing project of police reform in Turkey become central to the increasingly authoritarian regime of Erdogan's AKP Party? Engaging political theory and a gender studies perspective, this book traces the implementation of security sector reform in Turkey, showing how various agents, including Islamist policy-makers, Turkish police and the women's movement in Turkey have contributed to and resisted growing police powers. A critical study which also employs case studies, this is a timely intervention on the 'authoritarian turn' in Turkey and contributes to a growing number of studies of neoliberalism and security in the context of liberal internationalism. Produced in association with the British Institute at Ankara

1

The new liberal geoculture

In November 2011, when I entered the newly established Security Sector Reform Department of the UN premises in New York, I was truly welcomed. The department was composed of an international team of experts, mostly of non-Western origins. My visit was motivated by a need to better understand how the practitioners of global governance were producing knowledge in the field of security governance; how they were devising their projects/programmes of state restructuring and what were the principles they were advocating during their state-building missions.

Security sector reform (SSR) was defined as a change in power relations and pictured as a messy process whose primary aim is to develop a new social contract between the ruled and the rulers in conflict-affected national contexts. Different from the immediate post-Cold War era’s frenzy promotion of democratization, especially in the post-Soviet state-building contexts, the Security Sector Reform of the late post-Cold War era has displayed a post-colonial ethos, an envy to disassociate liberal internationalism from its imperialist and colonialist strategies. There were three common and notable points mentioned in the different interviews I conducted. The first one was the changeover from a democratization perspective to good governance during the promotion and implementation of SSRs. The second was the shift from a Western-imposed reform strategy and process to the principle of national ownership. The third was the change from a consultative to a participatory process, where the real aim is to engage ordinary people into the SSR process, engineer a common wisdom among them and create good motivations so that some social groups agree to lose power.

SSR was conceived as a non-teleological process of state transformation, where the ultimate objective was not replicating liberal democracy but finding local governance solutions – even if these are not in line with the norms of liberal democracy. When I asked about the popularity of this new approach among the different international agents involved in the SSR projects, I also learned that despite a general commitment to this new approach at the normative level, there have been different approaches to the SSR processes due to different regional focuses. For example, one of my interlocutors would illustrate, ‘the United Nations SSR Department and the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF) have different regional focuses, different historical mandates and indeed different strategies’. The DCAF is primarily involved in the post-Cold War reorganization of European politics in Eastern Europe, whereas the UN has been engaged in fragile states and primarily in Africa.

My research showed that Turkey was somehow linked to both security reform initiatives applied by these different actors, in these two different regional settings. Whereas as a host country it was mostly subject to an early post-Cold War-era style of SSR, basically interested in regime change, it was also open to the ideological baggage of the UN-led SSR efforts in post-conflict contexts. Turkey has been involved in many UN-led peacekeeping and peace-building missions and has sent various police envoys to these missions who have returned Turkey accompanied with a similar missionary vision of policing (Hülagü, 2016). But also, as the timing of the SSR experience of Turkey from early 2000s to early 2010s coincides with the post-colonial turn in the liberal geoculture, even the more conventional SSR actors such as the DCAF would possess for Turkey a reform perspective beyond mere regime change.

The meddling of these two state projects has had important implications for the case of Turkey. To understand Turkey’s experience of the reform process, I first invite the reader in this chapter to have a look at the two SSR styles, see their differences but also commonalities, especially in relation to the notion of human security. To this end, the chapter follows a synthetic approach. In other words, following a political theory-based discussion about the notion of human security, the reader will be presented by a general portrait of the SSR in two different contexts. Rather than making an analytical presentation of each and every element of the SSR processes, this section presents the general outcomes of the SSR processes in different contexts under two important arguments: (1) the early post-Cold War SSR agenda has been a programme for advancing anti-statist populism and (2) the late post-Cold War SSR agenda has been a programme for statist localism.

Having presented these two main arguments, the chapter follows with the presentation of the SSR community in Turkey. These latter include international technical experts, transnational NGOs, academics and the resident staff of various international organizations. It will be shown that these reformers’ referent subject for human security is still an abstract individual, albeit different from the generic individual of classical liberalism. It is slightly modified and adapted to their perception of society and politics in Turkey. The main subject referent is a property-owner modest man: an individual supposedly ignored and side-lined in the social contract that the Kemalist/militarist state in Turkey had maintained in general.¹ The women, however, are introduced as ‘women-and-children’, a perennial way of representing women as innocent and vulnerable creatures – in the very minor opportunities when the SSR community felt the necessity to refer to their own gender sensitivities.

A challenging and final task of this chapter, and a standpoint which substantially differentiates it from the existing critical SSR literature, is also to include the non-traditional actors of SSR in this analysis. In other words, the emergence and mainstreaming of the concept of human security have also been galvanized with the efforts of the transnational women’s movement, which concentrated its efforts in the post-1995 Beijing Conference era to anti-violence struggles – and micro-credit schemes (Barton, 2004). That is why, I propose that the SSR processes should be conceived in a broader perspective than they appear at first sight. In fact, the police trainings to prevent violence against women were organized for about a decade by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Turkey, an international organization unlike the conventional SSR actors. Different from the populism and localism of the two SSR visions on the state, the UNFPA-led project adopts universalism, a call for equal introduction to state-sponsored rules of entitlement. Accordingly, the state apparatus is responsible for granting its women citizens the right to protection. Nevertheless, the fundamental philosophical difference between the populist-cum-localist horizon of the conventional SSR agents and the universalist horizon of the UNFPA-led project tends to disappear in practice, as the resistance of statecraft to change leads the feminist contenders to adopt a behaviourist strategy.

All in all, this chapter gives the reader a holistic perspective on the Security Sector Reform and the human security philosophy behind it. It argues for conceiving the SSR processes as an essential part of the post-Cold War era’s liberal geoculture. ‘Liberal geoculture’ is a term adopted by Immanuel Wallerstein (2011) to depict the becoming of liberalism by the end of nineteenth century a globally endorsed common sensual meta-ideology.

According to Wallerstein (2011: 1–2), ideology is the sum of strategies adopted to resolve ‘what prima facie seems a deep and possibly unbridgeable gap of conflicting interests’ and liberalism is such a meta-strategy. It tries to reconcile the contradictions between the demands for popular sovereignty – of the radicals/socialists/revolutionaries who ask for a rapid change – and the desire for the maintenance of elitist status quo – of the notables. To this end, liberalism set itself in the late nineteenth century the task to re-construct both sides and their political projects as extremes or, if we translate this to the conceptual luggage of this study, as two non-events the bourgeois state form should take care of. For Wallerstein (2011), liberalism has since then placed itself at the centre and become a centrist ideology. It mainstreamed itself by monopolizing the authority to define the extremes. In line with this way of reasoning, it is possible to argue that the liberal geoculture of the post-Cold War era is an attempt to redefine the extremes, the two non-events or the scope of possible that the capitalist state should embrace to secure the reproduction of the existing social and economic order.

From human rights to human security

Liberalism as a special meta-strategy to govern the main contradictions of the capitalist world system is in fact an ideology of state formation. In other words, since its early beginnings liberals were interested in finding the golden mean between the monarchical political classes who govern the international sphere through their inter-state clubs of privileged men and the proletarian internationalists who would like to dismantle the conservative classes’ political power by way of dethroning the historical category of political class altogether. Liberalism, consequently, developed the doctrine of nation-state and self-determination. Accordingly, monarchical power would be replaced by national power and yet this latter would also constitute a barrier before the proletarian internationalists (Mazower, 2013).²

By the late nineteenth century, however, liberalism’s focus switched from domestic developments to overseas. Colonial encounters shaped it deeply. Liberals started to argue against the universality of the principle of liberty. Accordingly, not every community would be able to adopt it as it necessitated certain civilizational prerequisites. To this end, following the First World War, liberals proposed the establishment of proto states, in fact protectorates that would supposedly tutor the ‘barbaric’ peoples and the ‘savages’ about the meaning of sovereign politics (Mazower, 2006). Interestingly at home as well, liberals like Woodrow Wilson were unwilling to grant political rights to non-white people and to women and argued for the existence of prerequisites for democracy – like the habits of self-control and self-discipline that these groups were not trained in (Hobson, 2012). The October Revolution, the labour and suffragette militancy which alarmed the Western powers in the inter-war era and the Second World War have all culminated in the embedding of liberalism in democracy or in ‘the democratisation of liberalism’ (Jahn, 2013).

By the mid-twentieth century, under the force of events liberalism had to endorse two governing human rights’ principles: freedom from fear and freedom from want. The ‘For Freedom from Fear’ poster of the United Nations advertised in 1945 depicts a nuclear family composed of a mother, a father and a child. The family sits in an open-air recreation area. In the background there is a factory with its grey smoke coming out of the chimney. The child goes playing with his toys. He or she is safe and happy. The family represents the middle-class ideal of liberal internationalism, a worker family that becomes wealthy enough to get incorporated into the system and enjoy the non-work time in safety.³ As early as 1945, freedom from fear was thus posited as freedom from want or as in Theodor Roosevelt’s formulation securing welfare would also mean instituting an effective police power.

By the end of the Cold War, however, the liberal geoculture was in a crisis of success. Immanuel Wallerstein (1995) even declared the dissolution of the Soviet Union as the defeat of liberalism per se. According to him, the demise of communism also displayed the failure of the liberal proposal that the contradictions emanating from structures of inequality could be handled by a developmentalist state. Within two decades of time, John Ikenberry (2009), a prominent pro-US establishment neo-Wilsonian, asserted that the victory over the Soviet model could not help liberalism to restore the loss of authority emanating from the failure of the ideal of a developmentalist state. The liberals have started asking if the modern state form, including its developmentalist nation-state variant, had not been useful to govern the main contradictions, then ‘what is to be done?’ (Slaughter, 2009). As a result, two different sets of proposals – human rights and human security – have been put into practice to restore the authority of liberalism.

Starting from the late 1970s, liberal internationalists argued for the fostering of personal political rights in and by civil society – hence also curtailed down the expanded notion of human rights of the Rooseveltian liberalism. By the 1990s, it was argued that liberalism’s main mission should be to propagate solely for freedom from fear since when coupled with freedom from want, the emergence of a harmful state power had been inevitable (Keohane, 2002). Human rights were defined as the grammar of and for political emancipation. The main objective was defined as revealing state abuses against political dissidents. This approach was reproached by radical figures, such as Naomi Klein (2007), who argued how this exclusive and impartial focus on abuses, though not ineffective at all at reaching immediate targets, helped the accompanying socio-political transformation process, namely neoliberalism, to escape from sight.

However, in the meantime there occurred a tricky transformation in this political abuse-priority perspective. Whereas ‘freedom from fear’ was by then posited as a political right, after the 9/11 it has been redefined as a right to protection. Whereas during the euphoric years of liberal victory, fear was discussed as a very material (i.e. corrupt police forces, state brutality) thing that prevents people from doing politics, since the 9/11 it has been redefined as a state of mind (i.e. feeling of risk and vulnerability before unforeseeable events) that prevents people from looking after themselves. In other words, whereas human rights approach of liberal internationalism focused on human beings as agents of change who do possess political will (but sidestepped the socio-economic needs), human security approach of liberal internationalism focused on human beings as victims of unpredictable events (and coded socio-economic needs as personal or communal vulnerabilities).

The notion of human security was offered by the then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan just after the 9/11 attacks as a new conceptual framework to make sense of the side effects of neoliberal globalization in the Global South. Building on the discussions of globalization with a human face, Annan tried to make the development agenda of the UN relevant to the United States which was still in trauma of attacks (Mazower, 2013: 372). It was implied that the global security depends on the development of human beings living below subsistence levels in the outskirts of the global periphery. It was assumed that extremism was a direct result of poverty and deprivation. In 2003, the UN published the Human Security Now report.

In the report, human security is defined as ‘including the excluded’, creating ‘the widest possible range of people having enough confidence in their future – enough confidence that they can actually think about the next day, the next week, and the next year’. It is argued that reverting to a limited notion of state security would be fallacious and that human security would and should complement state security to prevent the dangers of war looming in the horizon (Ogata and Sen, 2003). This neo-Rooseveltian approach to liberal internationalism, which conceives improving the class status of millions and promoting them to the middle class as building a safety belt for world peace, soon became exceedingly popular in global governance.

Hence, the notion of human security paradoxically obliterated political rights and in fact political emancipation. In that sense, its conception of recognition had also differed from that of human rights. The human rights perspective of liberal internationalism, although still limited in its conception of politics, initially was also a way of responding to the rise of the 1968 Revolutions in the West and recognizing their political sway. The human security perspective of liberal internationalism, however, is at odds with the Political as such. It recognizes people only in their capacity to live bare life, a life that is defined with minimums and basic survival. Human existence is ontologically reduced to the field of necessities.

In fact, historically speaking, human security demands as demands of and for necessities were revolutionary demands. They were the engine behind the making of the modern state. The modern state power was in fact justified on the grounds of the protection of the life of the citizen (McLaughlin, 2016). Hence the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ passionate demands for human security revolutionized the political field, dismembered the political classes, de-legitimized sovereign power and accorded legitimacy to the state on the condition of its being a security provider to laymen. However, in the post-9/11 era, human security demands re-privileged the state as the primary agent of change and presented the recipients as powerless masses. The administrative will of the state seemed to hold the key to social question reframed as a humanitarian problem (Marks, 2011).

Despite all of the fair and multi-layered criticisms against it, liberal humanism was once promoted with an emphasis on the idea that human beings do and should possess ethical autonomy, freedom and equality to develop their creative capacities (Brown, 2015). Seen from this perspective, the doctrine of human security is not even humanist. The political desires, instincts and aspirations that define human beings have been all dropped out of the intellectual box of new liberalism or post-liberalism, as David Chandler (2010) names it. Neither the basic needs nor the human aspirations to a better life are Political problems. The human of human security is not a homo politicus.

One implication of this has been that the security provision started to be conceived as a matter of goodwill and the recipient of protection as the ultimate victim. The security provision has been conditioned by victimization. This inevitably shores up paternalist tendencies and depending on the political and socio-economic structure of the specific context where it becomes active, it restores and/or renews patriarchal contracts. According to Paul Amar (2011), who empirically focuses on the case of Egypt, ‘human-security states’ try to bring back a respectable patriarchy by restoring the myth of masculinist protection.

Not surprisingly, however, in updated patriarchal states, not all victims are accorded protection. Human security restores, keeps up and constructs old and new social hierarchies. In other words, once a public good, security has been redefined as a status good. Once the security contract is redefined over goodwill, the security provider, the beholder of the goodwill, possesses a right to choose, to select the right victim without even recurring to any rhetoric of equality and universalism. He can lean on different philosophies of ‘goodwill’: moralist, theological and/or religious administrative rationalities to choose the ‘right’ recipient. Human security, therefore, as a liberal project is a post-secular or even anti-secular project.

Security sector reform and human security in regime change contexts

One of the primary implementation contexts for the SSR projects was Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The new liberal geoculture
• 2 Moralist philosophy of the police reform
• 3 Feminist interventions in and against the state
• 4 State violence against politically active women
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint